


Down The Rabbit Hole

by oncejustadream



Category: Orphan Black (TV)
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-07-02
Updated: 2013-07-02
Packaged: 2017-12-16 21:24:59
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,901
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/866758
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/oncejustadream/pseuds/oncejustadream
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Beth's story, pre-Pilot. Begins with Katja's phone call and ends at the train<br/>station.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Down The Rabbit Hole

I.

 

            She receives the call following a meeting about a body that’s turned up at the train station. It was a shooting, probably executed at night with the aid of a silencer. No personal belongings found at the scene- so far the victim is unidentified. His face still lingers in Beth’s mind when her phone goes off in the parking lot outside of the station.

            “This is Beth Childs.”

            “Ms. Childs,” the caller begins, almost hesitantly. It’s a woman’s voice, coarse and thickly accented. “I… I’m contacting you about something of mutual interest, to us both.”

            “Is this about an investigation?” Beth asks, leaning against her car door.

            “…Yes.” The stranger replies after a pause. Beth thinks she can hear a muffled cough on the other end of the line. “I would feel more comfortable speaking to you in person- is there somewhere we could meet?”

            Beth considers what this could possibly be about- the train station shooting is a fresh case; it’s unlikely that anyone would know to contact her with information at this point. They still have a few months old investigation on the backburner, though. It’s worth seeing what this woman has to say 

            “There’s a coffee shop on Queen Street, we can meet there around ten tomorrow.”

            “Great, I will see you there, Ms. Childs. I will wear a fur coat; I should be… easy to recognize.”

  

            When she gets home that night she spots a bag of take-out sitting on the kitchen counter, and Paul lying in front of the television. He’s still wearing his office clothes- a now rumpled white shirt and some slacks. Something about the way he looks so domestic and comfortable while the shooting is so fresh in her mind unsettles Beth. As she drops her keys in the bowl next to the door he kills the light of the screen and stands up to greet her. 

            “Hey babe,” he murmurs, easing her coat off her shoulders, “I got takeout.” Beth takes a deep breath and smiles, shaking away her former thoughts. She presses a kiss to his lips. “You’re too good.”

 

            Near the end of their dinner Paul looks up from a box of noodles. “There was a man on the news today- they found him at the train station.” Beth puts her fork down, blinks twice.

           “Yea, its our case,” she murmurs.

            “Its such a shame, dying like that,” he says, taking a bite of the noodles. The man’s gaunt face rises in Beth’s mind again. She gets up to shove the rest of her food in the fridge. “Everything you are, just gone in an instant. Good thing there’s people like you- to put a name to their faces.”

            “I’m going to bed,” Beth says.

 

            That night she dreams that she’s running, following the man from the train station as they race along the tracks. Suddenly hands reach out and grab her; she can feel them all over her, pulling her to the ground, corrupting her skin. Her body burns faintly as it touches the metal tracks. The man turns around to look at her, but his face is gone, replaced by a void the color of dried blood. Then there are more hands, pinning her to the ground.

            When she wakes she can’t shake the feeling they leave on her skin.

 

            The next morning she fills Art in on the mystery caller and takes a cab to meet the woman. The first to arrive, she grabs a window seat and orders a latte. As the barista hands her the steaming drink she hears the door chime open and closed, sees in her peripheral vision a woman wearing a fluffy coat place her bag on a table in the corner. She turns around and approaches the table, extending a hand. “Hello, I’m Beth Childs-” she begins. But then the woman looks up, removes her pair of large sunglasses.

             Beth almost drops her coffee all over the floor.

            “Clones,” she whispers, testing the foreign word on her tongue. It’s a word that evokes science fiction- futuristic pictures of society, test tubes and factories and space travel. But here she is, sitting at a little café table across from a mirror of herself, who is at the moment sipping a cup of tea and watching her every reaction with worried eyes. This feels like a bizarre intrusion into real life, like she’s stepped into a movie.

             She wouldn’t have believed the German stranger’s story about cloning if she hadn’t provided overwhelming evidence to support it- a portfolio of other faces like their own, spread out on the table like the entrance to the rabbit hole. _Someone is killing us._ As she looks at these women Beth tries not to see herself, but she can’t help but feeling like the photographs on these passports and birth certificates are her own, the word _deceased_ printed in Katja’s neat handwriting beneath each one.

 

              That week she does a search for facial recognition on IDs in the area, secretly hoping that she will come up empty handed. After all, how many of them could there possibly be? How easy could it be to create something as unique, as complicated, as a human being?

            She has her answer in the matter of a day- she’s found two more, one native to California and the other a local. Beth sends separate but identical emails to both stating that she thinks they may be sisters separated at birth and that she’d like to meet them. Drafting the email reminds her of her youth- she briefly indulges the return of her childhood fantasy of having a sibling. She tries to pretend that they’re all just sisters, that this whole situation is not so sinister. But then she sees one of the passports still open in attachments, sees the word deceased, and her happy denial ends as soon as it began.

 

II.

 

           A few days later Alison Hendrix responds to the email and schedules a meeting in the city. A wealthy housewife with the kind of tight body language that suggests a dependency on denial, Alison takes the news predictably poorly. When Beth mentions the word clone she laughs harshly. “You’re insane,” she murmurs, shaking her head repeatedly with disbelief. She keeps blinking, as though at any moment Beth will disappear. “We must be twins. You know, I always wondered if this might happen. And of course my twin _would_ be insane.”

           “Alison, look, I realize this is hard to believe, but I have proof...” Beth reaches inside her bag for the birth certificates and passports, places them on the table. Alison scans them, her expression changing from surprise to panic. She shakes her head violently another time and stands, pushing the documents away. One falls to the floor, and Beth doesn’t even have time to retrieve it before Alison is out the door, throwing one last bewildered look her way.

 

            The next morning she calls Beth to schedule another meeting, consenting to listen to the entire story. Her voice sounds hoarse, like she hasn’t slept since they last talked.

           “I don’t want to meet the others,” she tells Beth at the end of the explanation. Her fingers massage her neck absentmindedly whilst her eyes roam the view outside the window, refusing to look at her identical.

           “That’s fine.” Beth doesn’t offer her a smile, doesn’t try to tell her that she should give the others a chance, if only to come to terms with the reality of the situation. She understands- she wants all of this, all of them, to disappear as well. “I’ll call you when we need something.”

  

            The meeting with the scientist goes considerably better. They set up a video chat; Beth has made sure that Paul will be out for the night. She spends thirty minutes staring at the screen in anticipation, a glass of wine in hand. When Cosima comes into view the effect is no more shocking than the first two times- Beth raises her eyebrows at this new version of herself, whose large glasses and dreadlocked hair give her a more youthful look than the others.

            Cosima takes the news well, almost too well for Beth’s comfort. She is hesitant at first to speak, just stares at Beth with wonderment, but as Beth begins to finish her explanation she grows increasingly warm and fascinated. “ _Wow,”_ she keeps repeating. “This is… This is amazing.”

           “Anyway,” Beth says, trying to keep the conversation in the realm of business. “We may need your help in the future, so please stay in touch.”

          “Of course, totally.” Beth resents the eagerness in the other woman’s voice.

          “I’ll let you know if I find out anything else." 

          Cosima nods, and then their eyes meet for a moment and both of them pause, frozen in the mirrors of their computer screens, until Beth musters the will to shut off the screen.

 

          That week she and Art meet at their favorite restaurant, a Chinese place not far from the station. They both order the usual, and Art makes some crack about Beth needing two servings. “You look as scrawny as Raj,” he jokes, but she can see the concern in his eyes.

          “Hey, I can still get the job done better than your lazy ass,” she bites back. “You know you never have to worry about me letting you down.”

          “Yea, I know, you got my back.” The server brings them their plates, and Art grins at her as he sprinkles some salt on his. “And I’ve got yours.” Beth nods, touched by this rare moment of sentimentality from her normally hard-assed partner. She thinks about telling him everything, knows that at some point she might need someone on her side to turn to, and that Art cares. But how much?

 

           Alison calls soon after.

          “You’re a cop, right? I have children, a family, I need to know that I can protect them.” She sounds defensive, as if she has to justify her fear. “In return for my financial contribution, I thought you might be able to help me with that.”

          “Of course,” Beth says, fingering her own gun lying on the kitchen table.

 

           Alison looks surprisingly comfortable holding the gun Beth lends her. Despite this she fails to hit the target the first five times she shoots, and after the fifth she releases another five shots quickly out of frustration. When she turns around Beth can tell that she’s holding back tears.

          “You’re doing well,” Beth assures her, removing her ear-plugs and gently taking the gun from the other woman.

          “I don’t see how missing the target completely could be considered doing well.” Alison’s voice is high and thin; it breaks slightly hysterically on the bitter words. “If I can’t hit a target that’s just sitting there, how could I possibly hit an actual threat?”

          “You’d be surprised what you’re capable of when you have to be,” Beth replies, reloading the gun.

 

III.

 

          Just when Beth is beginning to adapt to things, albeit with the help of some of the pills she'd told herself she'd stop taking, Katja calls her on her new pink phone, the one that they’ve bought exclusively for all of the clones.

         “I think someone may have followed me here,” she says. “I am worried, Beth.” Her voice is coarse, her words punctuated by short gasps. Beth thinks she hears coughing again, muffled through the phone.

         “Are you alright?” she asks.

         “I am sick… I’m sure it’s nothing to worry about.”

         “What kind of sick?” 

         “Just a cough.” Beth lets it go. 

         “Why do you think someone’s following you?” 

         “There’s a car, I’ve seen it some times while driving, but it never stops. It is black, a Toyota, I think, but I am not sure.”

         “Alright,” she sighs. “I’ll check it out.”

         “Thank you, Beth.” Another cough. “Please hurry.”

 

            Katja’s paranoia proves sound. Sure enough, when Beth manages to find time between cases to follow the German’s movements around the city she notices someone else doing the same. Female, middle aged, Asian, precise and discreet. Beth is only able to catch her one night after staking out at the hotel across from Katja’s for ten hours. Paul calls her the entire time, leaving countless concerned voicemails-

_Beth, where are you? Please tell me you’re not starting this again, please just let me know what’s going on. I’m worried about you._

           Beth listens to a few and then turns the phone on silent and looks out the window into the night. She loses track of time, watching cars blur past on the road below, listening to people come and go in the hallway behind her.

 

           Finally, like a mirage in the desert, Beth sees Katja pull up in a cab to the hotel. As she gets out she stoops over and holds a cloth to her mouth, body racked with coughs. Beth’s pulse quickens at the sight, and then quickens again when a minute or so later a car that fits Katja’s description pulls into the lot and idles. When a figure- female, from what Beth can make out- steps out, Beth truly becomes alarmed. If this woman is actually entering the hotel, she may hope to make contact. Tonight, Katja could be in danger of becoming the next clone with _deceased_ written beneath her name.

           Beth springs from her perch- she is already dialing Katja as she’s flying through her own hotel building, phone and gun thrown into her bag, panicked steps echoing through the stairwell. Katja picks up by the time Beth emerges onto the cold street.

          “Katja, listen to me, don’t go anywhere alone. Wherever you are, make sure there are people around you, do you understand?”

          “Ya, I understand.”

          “Stay on the line, okay?” Beth is on the other side of the street now; her hands shake as she pulls out her second phone and takes down the stranger’s license plate. “Don’t get distracted- whatever room you’re in, keep looking around, look directly at anyone who comes in.” 

           Beth finishes taking down the number, darts into the building. A man in the lobby asks her if she needs help and she brushes him off with an excuse. “Do you see anyone?” she asks into the phone.

           “No.” 

           “Okay, where are you?”

           “The restaurant. It is still open.”

           “Great, okay. Stay there until I call you again, alright?” Beth slips into the nearest hallway and finds the laundry room. She presses herself to the wall, heart pounding inside the small white room. She lets herself calm down a little before creeping back out and beginning to walk each hallway in search of the mystery woman. It takes a lot to cast aside her instinct to hide and preserve her own safety in favor of protecting the German.

 

            On the fifth floor, Katja’s floor, she finds the woman. She is standing at a corner, presumably waiting for Katja to enter her room so that she can follow her in. Beth is behind her at the other end of the hallway, and as she takes a step closer, gripping the gun still in her bag, the woman turns to look. A second passes as her gaze widens at the sight of Beth, and Beth waits to see if she will draw the gun on her. But something like recognition and annoyance passes over the woman’s face and in another second she is running the opposite way, towards the staircase. Beth chases after her but trips halfway down one flight of stairs. She goes flying into the cement on her shoulder with a grunt and tumbles a few more steps until her momentum breaks. She knows that she’s lost the woman and she pulls herself up shakily, leaning against the dirty wall.

            When she gets back to the lobby the car is gone. She calls Katja, breathing a sigh of relief when the redhead comes into sight.

            “What happened?” she asks. She looks like death- eyes ringed with red, skin the color of a dead fish. Beth imagines its damn close to how she’s looking right now.

            “It’s not safe for you here,” she says. “Get out as soon as possible, go somewhere else and lay low for a while.”

            Katja agrees and Beth heads home, though not after driving around for at least another hour to make sure she isn’t followed.

 

            She trudges into the apartment like some kind of zombie, throwing her bag on the table and sitting down head in hands. Without warning her throat constricts and her eyes fill with burning tears. She clenches her hand over her mouth and rocks back and forth, crying silently.

            She’s not sure how long she remains hunched in that spot before Paul emerges from the bedroom. He takes one look at her and his eyes go immediately soft. “Beth…”  he murmurs, approaching her slowly and resting a hand on her shoulder. His touch reduces her to louder sobbing; she sucks in breaths desperately as she tries to control the break down.

            It takes a while for her to finally calm down. When she stops crying she feels drained, weak. Paul lifts her by the arm, gently, and makes his way towards the bedroom, but Beth pushes away from him and into the bathroom. She locks the door behind her and reaches to open the cabinet.

            “Beth,” Paul pleads firmly from the other side of the door. “Please don’t.”

            Beth pulls her hair back from her face and squints at her reflection. She remembers the face of the man from the train station- they’d solved the case about a week ago. He’d been a nobody, an accountant traveling into the city to see a friend. The shooter had mistaken him for somebody else. Beth can’t think of something more tragic than that- dying someone else’s death for them.

            She fills a paper cup with water and unscrews two of the bottles, shaking the capsules out into her hand. They don’t feel like the solution she needs them to be as they slide down her throat.

 

            The next morning she’s woken at noon by her ringtone. It’s Art.

            “Where the hell have you been? We have a new case- there’s been a robbery at the Sun Jewelry store. Get your ass down here, soon.”

            “Calm the fuck down,” she growls. Her mouth feels fuzzy and a headache is raging behind her temples. She feels anything but ready to be a detective today.

 

            The new case should be a welcome break from the stress of her personal life, but Beth can’t focus at the scene. Her senses feel slightly dulled by the medication, but somehow this only takes her out of her work, rather than reducing her worry over the stranger. Art, who is normally so attuned to her mood shifts, doesn’t notice a thing. He asks her if she’ll go question some of the witnesses alone, since his daughter’s birthday is today and they’re throwing her a party later. Before she goes she looks up the mystery woman’s plates, finds her address and name. Maggie Chen. Beth wonders how she came to be caught up in their lives.

 

            She no longer trusts faces; the woman that greets her on her way into the apartment complex has large doe eyes and small ears, an innocent face that seems to offer only truths. Beth imagines her without that face, what she looks like on the inside.

            Last night when she looked in the mirror she felt lost. Her eyes, her nose, her mouth that tried to smile or frown but could only find something oddly in-between; they no longer felt like her own. They’d been taken from her, and she realized that a person without a face might not add up to very much at all. _She_ didn’t feel like very much at all. She felt small, a piece of science, a collection of some memories that seem like they belong to someone else. She’s the girl who stopped believing in Christmas when she was five, who broke her arm in a stupid stunt just to impress the boy she liked. She’s the woman that loves Paul, the woman who tried for years to become a detective because she had something to prove. (That she was strong enough, that there wasn’t a weakness pressing like a disease against the inside of her skin.) But she’s not strong, and those memories seem miles behind her.

            Back then, she never would have imagined that she’d fabricate a witness that lives in the same complex as Maggie Chen as an excuse for going there with her weapon, that she’d take so many pills while on the job to prepare herself for what she was about to do. She never would have understood the feeling of hunting but feeling hunted.

           The walls in the hallway are covered in peeling wallpaper, the kind with ambiguous floral swirls all over it. Beth is tracing their outlines sluggishly with her eyes when she notices an Asian woman step out of the elevator. Black coat, coal black hair, a slight falter in her step- Maggie Chen. She seems to move in slow motion. Beth steps toward her.

            _Hey!_ She shouts, breaks into a run. Chen flees into the stairwell. Beth chases her down towards the lower lobby. They dart through an empty courtyard area on the lower level. It’s a cloudless day and Beth squints as her eyes adjust to the pure sunlight. She draws her gun and points it at Maggie. The silencer she’s added makes it longer, more deadly looking. “I’ll shoot you.” Her voice is empty and low. Chen must feel the muzzle of the weapon eyeing her in the back of the head. She halts and turns around slowly, hands raised.

           “Who the fuck are you?” Beth snarls. 

            The woman looks at Beth with something like revulsion in her eyes. “I’m a scientist,” she says. “Or, I was. Before I made a mistake.”

            “I don’t want your life story. Who are you to _me_ , to the German?”

            The woman swallows, and the look she’s still giving Beth makes her feel like a bug pinned to a slide, like her skin is transparent.

           “ _You_ ,” she says, “are the mistake.” Beth grips the gun tighter. She’s having trouble keeping it trained on Chen; her coat feels heavy on her shoulders.

           “I was there when you were first created. _All_ of you. At the time it felt like what we had accomplished was a miracle, a breakthrough only dreamed of in books. There was no way to know if the project would be successful, so we kept it a secret, we monitored the subjects as discreetly as possible.” 

_The subjects._

          “It wasn’t until a few months ago that I saw how wrong we were to do it, to violate nature’s rules.”

           Beth’s brow furrows as she tries to take in the words. Her gun feels cold against her burning skin. “And now you’re trying to clean up your mistake?” The woman shakes her head.

          “You don’t understand,” she says. “You haven’t seen what I have, you don’t know what you are, _how many_ you are. Looking at you right now”- Maggie lets out a bitter chuckle under her breath- “I see something terrible. An abomination.”

          Beth shivers and runs a hand through her hair. 

          "I’m going to kill you. I know what happened in Europe. It’s not going to happen here.”

          “I have answers for you, Beth. Kill me and you’ll never find out.” Beth grunts in frustration, takes better aim. “There are more of us- you won’t escape it.” She’s right- it would be a return to square one. They will still be hunted. The face they wear marks them.

          Maggie must think she’s won, as she backs towards the door. Beth lets her go, lets her walk through the doorframe and out into the hallway. The cop follows her slowly, crosses the courtyard and steps into the hall. Maggie looks as if she’s about to run.

          Beth pulls the trigger.

 

          She keeps expecting someone to walk by in the moments after Chen falls to the ground, but no one does. When Art gets there she’s sitting on the floor, body surprisingly still apart from her hands, which shake uncontrollably.

          “Jesus fucking Christ,” Art mutters. “What have you done, Beth?”

          She follows Art with her eyes as he bends to examine Maggie. She’s fallen with arms splayed to the sides; it’s a Christ-like pose and the word _abomination_ flashes through Beth’s mind, crimson as the liquid seeping out of her scientist creator. Beth hunches sidewise, her stomach heaving. Art’s eyes keep flicking towards the end of the hallway as he tries to process the scene. He approaches Beth just as she sits back up, crouches in front of her. Her eyes roll up to the ceiling as a watery sob escapes her throat. Art grabs her jaw, turns her to face him completely.

         “What happened?” he asks. “Beth, what happened?” Panic is seeping into his voice. Beth’s eyes roll again, from Art to the body and then to an empty space in the corner. She feels weightless, hollowed like someone has torn out her center of gravity.

          “Are you on something right now?” Art hisses, and Beth tries to remember if there was a time when he ever found out about the pills.

          He grabs her by the elbow and forces her up so that she’s leaning against the wall. “Get your phone, now,” he says. Beth does as she’s told. “Call this in. It was an accident, you had the wrong woman. You thought there was a threat.” He grabs Chen’s bag and begins to rifle through it until his hand lands on a black cell phone, which he slips into the dead woman’s curled fingers. Beth gets off the phone with the officer and stares at Art, unsure what to do.

          “It _was_ an accident,” she murmurs. “I didn’t mean to.” Art shakes his head, as if he doesn’t believe her, and then leans against the wall in the other hallway to wait.

 

IV

 

            After that, things really change. The two worlds she’s been operating in have melded. Suspended from her job and detached from her family and friends, Beth spends most of the day driving through the city or taking trains, trying to entertain the feeling of running away. She wants to escape from herself.

            She’s managed to pull it together since the incident, at least outwardly. She tries to see the situation from Cosima’s point of view, tries to be scientifically excited about the truth of her biology, tries to see it as something special. This never works because its all become tied to death and murder and illness, and it feels nothing like a gift. So she can’t accept reality, but she takes the right number of pills, just enough to smile when Paul asks her how she’s doing in the morning. By most standards, she appears to be recovering from her “accident” well. 

            Art kept his distance for a little while after the shooting. By now he’s visited her a few times, insisting that she has to try to get back to normal, has to move on. She knows that every time he looks at her he sees that pathetic woman in the hotel, unresponsive and overwhelmed; it hangs like thick smoke in the air between them. But Art is like her- he’s the type to try to ignore problems until they just evaporate. So they never really talk about it, so it never really feels like _normal_ again, a place that Beth can barely remember.

 

           She does remember how she used to love curling up against Paul’s chest while they watched the news in the evening. How he used to sweep her hair from her shoulder and press kisses along the back of her neck, sending shivers dancing electric across her skin. 

           A day ago he’d tried to do that same thing. Ever since the shooting he’s watched her carefully, checked the number of pills that disappear each day, tried to make sure she’s not alone for too long. That night he’d caught her staring at her phone. She’d been thinking about Katja, staying in a small town in the next providence. She’d need to call her at some point to check up on her. Paul must’ve thought she was thinking about the accident, about the phone in Maggie Chen’s hand.

          “Beth,” he said. “It isn’t your fault.” He’d sighed, massaged her shoulder gently and then eased her back in her chair. But as he brushed her hair away from her neck and whispered “I’m right here with you”, she’d remembered Maggie’s words and her blood had run cold. W _e monitored the subjects as discreetly as possible._  

  

            Some time later she borrows camera equipment from Raj. He seems to have a crush on her and doesn’t think twice, despite her suspension. In the afternoon she meets Alison and Cosima at the latter’s hotel. Cosima’s decided to get her PhD in evolutionary development (Beth has to roll her eyes at this eager declaration), and her research at the University of Minnesota has brought her close enough that she’s been able to travel up to see them in person. Alison has finally consented to meet the third clone, although the two have probably some of the most incompatible personalities Beth has ever seen.

           “So what is this about?” Alison finally interrupts after Cosima has been talking about her new research plans for at least ten minutes.

           Beth had planned to tell them about Maggie Chen- it feels wrong hiding such important information. But the way Alison seems so uncomfortable around Cosima, the fact that she still can’t even wrap her head around the fact that they all exist, causes Beth to keep quiet about the chilling news. She covers by bringing up Katja’s cough. Panic fills Alison’s body immediately; the housewife looks at Beth helplessly, as though she might have some solution to the problem.

          “Do you think there could be something wrong with all of us?”

          Beth sighs. She hates that she’s become the leader in all of this. “I don’t know. I figured Cosima could run some tests, see what she can find.”

           Cosima's expression reveals her eagerness to be of help. “Of course. I’ll need a briefcase with every clone’s information and samples.” Alison’s head jerks up. “Could you please not use that word,” she requests tensely.

           Beth and Alison leave the apartment at the same time. Beth walks Alison to her car, and as she’s getting into the driver’s seat Alison pauses and looks up at Beth. Her face seems at once apologetic, proud, and grateful; it’s not a face Beth thinks she’s ever made. “I just wanted to say, that I really appreciate what you’ve done for all of us. Putting yourself out there and being in the middle of it all,” Alison says.

           Beth smiles, gently closes the door of the car. “It’s really no problem Alison. We’re in this together, right? Whether we want it or not.” Alison nods bitterly, flexes her hands on the steering wheel. 

          “Stay safe, Beth.”

 

           When she gets home Beth installs the surveillance equipment around the house and in Paul’s car. She tries not to think about it when she goes to bed, tries to assure herself that she won’t record anything strange during the day, that when she wakes she’ll see nothing on the bedroom tape but two lovers sleeping peacefully together throughout the night.

           The dream returns, only this time she is the man from the train station, and she’s holding her own hand as another version of herself runs behind her. The tracks split into three directions in front of her, and just as she’s trying to make a choice she feels a sharp pain in her forearm. When she looks back her other self has shifted into the shape of Maggie Chen, holding a smoking gun. Beth gets one look at her arm, where a bullet hole is weeping red, before she feels the familiar hands latch onto her and she is pulled fitfully from her dreams.

          For a few nights she’s too afraid to check the tapes. She calls Katja and tells her about the briefcase. She does her laundry. She visits her an old friend. But finally she can’t resist anymore, and she powers up her laptop.

          Despite her recent paranoia she’s not expecting to see Paul get up out of bed, take a syringe out of his briefcase, and slide it  into her arm. She’s not expecting him to leave, replaced by three men with medical gear. She’s not expecting the way her unconscious body jerks as they manhandle it. She never expected this revelation to feel this way, like the last string tying her to what used to be reality has just been severed.

 

V

 

            The ride to the train station takes twenty minutes.

            She thinks of Paul first. His face is fuzzy in her mind, blurred by the pills she’s taken before getting into the cab. She hasn’t been able to shake him from her thoughts since watching the tape. The spots on her where she can remember his touch feel corrupted. She feels used.

           She thinks of her mother and father- how simple her life had been with them. The trips to the zoo, the song her mother used to sing her when she was falling asleep. Beth hums the tune now, wishing that a knot of suspicion weren’t snaking through her veins- that they knew all along, that in their eyes she was a child of science, an abomination.

           She thinks of Alison, so dependent on others to tell her who she is. They’re more alike than Beth would care to admit. Up until now protecting Alison has been a way of protecting a part of herself that she tried to deny. But now that weak part of herself has consumed the rest of her, and she knows she can’t protect Alison from this anymore.

           She thinks of Art, who’s come the closest to seeing the chaos that her life has become. She’d rather leave him now than let him watch her retreat even further from the partner he had in the beginning.

          Finally, she remembers the face of the shooting victim. She’d stared down at his body in this same dark tunnel not long ago, a different person. Beth tries not to think about that body; how empty a person becomes when they die.

          On the platform she folds some of her clothing, places her bag neatly beside it. The action is a refusal to meet her end like that man, to die as anyone but herself.

          Maggie Chen’s words echo in her head. _You don’t know what you are._ How many _you are._

          Beth stands, takes a deep breath. She feels like she is about to free herself, like she’s returning to a person that she lost for a while. The train rumbles in the distance, and Beth rises, turns to prepare herself. She has the sensation of being in her dreams again; she can feel the hands reaching out to her, grazing her skin. She turns to escape them, towards the train.

          The last face she sees before she surrenders is her own, staring back at her as though she’s already a ghost. 


End file.
